CVE-2026-17042

high
Assigned by CNA: ibm
Published 2026-08-19 · Modified 2026-08-19
CVSS v3
7.3
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:L/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
7.3

Description

IBM Power Systems Firmware FW950.00 through FW950.H2, OP940.00 through OP940.a1 (Power9), and OP940.00 - OP940.81 (Power HMC) is affected by a vulnerability in host firmware NVRAM parsing. An attacker with root access to a guest partition on an OpenPOWER system can write a specially crafted NVRAM image, causing the host firmware boot stage to crash with possible memory corruption. This condition persists until operator intervention — clearing NVRAM via the service processor — to restore normal operation. This vulnerability only affects OpenPOWER systems; systems running PowerVM are not affected. Successful exploitation results in an integrity and availability impact to the managed system.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
72%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-125

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.